Media Lab projects are so tantalizing. Witness John Maeda's Physical Language Workshop, a follow on to the Aesthetics + Computation Group. The PLW is supposedly working on a project called the Treehouse Studio, underlying the OpenAtelier. The Treehouse Studio embodies a concept that's just about due: really nicely designed and integrated rich media authoring and management through the web. About a year and a half ago, I was talking about a similar project that had Alexa and John Seeley Brown involved. Bits and pieces are floating around, but I was hoping the PLW had made some major strides. Weblogs made text read/write for the Web, and photos are getting there, but there's plenty of strides to be made for other media.
What can I find related to Treehouse Studio? Not much other than year old pre-alphaish demos. No papers, no source code, no updates. The rhetoric on the PLW web page is great, but digging deeper all I get is vapor. Still I can hope that another hardy band of students, many of the current crop seem to have moved on, wash up on Maeda's shores and pull it all together.